Reading the city: on walking around and sense-making
'A good walk can clear your head', recommends the now widespread mantra of mindfulness and wellbeing. And although short getaways are usually framed as escapes, they can sometimes bring reality home. This piece is a compilation of random thoughts that occurred to me whilst promenading aimlessly after two months of self-isolation.
Loosely inspired by urban anthropology and informed by my own research on ‘liveness’ and the phenomenology of social media, this is a modest attempt to convey the ordinary experience of walking around in an empty East London quarter.
As a long-time believer in the power of occasional wandering, I found these first few months of social distancing to be particularly stagnating. I know, people here in the UK were allowed to go out to exercise once a day as long as they kept 2m apart.
Yet, the mere possibility of crossing paths with other human beings made my heartbeat race and my hands sweat.
It was just easier to stay in and binge-watch the newest reality show while stress-scrolling my Twitter feed instead of facing the ubiquitous threat represented by the potential encounter with strangers. However, after two months of postponing my cherished unpretentious walking, I finally decided to give it a try — and it paid off big time.
The destination (which was uncertain by the time I left my flat) was Fish Island.
Fish Island is an often-overlooked industrial piece of land surrounded by the canals and neighboured by other more notorious East London attractions, such as Hackney Wick and the Olympic Park.
Comprised mostly of multi-storey warehouses and recycling facilities converted into lofts, studios, and workspaces, the area has been slowly overtaken by artists, designers, and those creative types we tend to label as hipsters. It is, no doubt, the kind of hidden gem of a place that provides you with a full camera-roll of snaps for the ‘gram, if that’s your thing. It’s also a prolific source of food for thought.
In contemplation mode, I roamed around the factory-looking blocks and tried to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. As generally happens with increasingly gentrified areas, in Fish Island the walls are covered by colourful graffiti, and street art murals are as much part of the local landscape as are Hereford Union Canal and the Stadium.
Being an aspiring Media & Communications scholar, I couldn’t help noticing that, in a demonstration of unapologetic self-awareness, the outdoorsy gallery was not only there to be gazed in passing — it was openly inviting registration and circulation.
Of course, all the common tropes of hipster-ish street art were there: multicoloured paint splashes, defaced pop culture references, edgy anti-neoliberalism statements, and the eventual swear word targeting a public figure.
Still, in this low-key walk, I found that the remark-ability (which I take here as the capacity to catch the pedestrian’s attention) of the messages on the walls was heavily dependent on their power to connect with our lived experiences in these weird times we’re all in.
I went outside seeking a momentary escape, but walking around made me feel deeply grounded in reality.
Maybe it’s my brain not being able to focus on anything else, but I felt like every mural had something to communicate about the pandemic — a topic sharply addressed by the artists with varying degrees of subtlety (and wittiness).
Referentiality is sometimes a currency, and the value of actuality has never been more obvious to me.
Each of those pictures, I realised, gave me a sense of existence. Their presence made me feel present in the present — which is particularly appreciated when the days and weeks go by undifferentiated, and we live in an endless today in which tomorrow never seems to come.
In times of enforced social remoteness, you can’t meet people, but you can encounter places. You might not have a proper face-to-face conversation with human beings outside of your household, but at least you can still read the stories written all across your town.
As with my undirected walking, this piece didn’t have a pre-determined path or destination.
It is meant to be, I guess, more about the sentience of looking for something than about finding anything in specific at all. Still, it's always fascinating to witness urban landscapes — which are usually analysed through a historical lens — being used as a platform of inscription for telling a story as it unfolds.
